


Vindiction

by TamerLorika



Series: Stories on the Quantum Penguin [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebellion Era - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Interspecies Relationship(s), Interspecies Romance, M/M, Rescue Missions, i am angry mostly so have a thing, what is beta'ing anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-20
Updated: 2017-05-20
Packaged: 2018-11-02 17:58:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10949781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TamerLorika/pseuds/TamerLorika
Summary: In the weeks after they escape on the Defenestrator, Nachkt and Rawrwargh make friends and enemies and very little progress----until they do, and Nachkt can't let this moment slip away.





	Vindiction

**Author's Note:**

> Set several months after 'The Defenestration of Pod' and the tales 'First Steps Onward', aka half an RPG game we're writing our own ending to. TDP would be useful to have read, first.

Ord Mantell was the perfect putrid hole for all this to play out, Nachkt thought ill-temperedly as he hunched under his hood against the rain. It stank like piss, but that might have just been part of the ambiance of the spaceport—piss in, piss out. It wasn’t even the main space port. 

He wasn’t cut out for this shit, the lying and the sneaking. He preferred blasters and action to the subterfuge he was employed in—namely, his recent new career in warehouse security.

The Trandoshan didn’t belong here, and although his alias was airtight—and no one on this rock would care if it wasn’t—he couldn’t help flinching a look over his shoulder every time he was spoken to, every time he was called ‘Kecht’ had to remind himself to answer. 

Not for the first time that day, he berated himself for his idiocy. Stars, even Rawrwargh would be eons better than him, and the furball didn’t even speak fragging Basic.

The thought of Rawrwargh made his mood plummet even further. It would have been alright, maybe, the enforced separation, now going on three weeks standard—if Nachkt had any clue where his mate was.

Which was the point, sure. Didn’t mean that Nachkt liked it. He deserved it, though. He was here, after all, because he was atoning. 

See, they hadn’t made it to Klatooine in time. Between Bimesaari and the fucking Bothan and the rest of that Scorekeeper-forsaken adventure, by the time they’d arrived at the auction house, all of Rawrwargh’s kin were gone. Even less fortunately, Nachkt himself had deeply misunderstood how fast news of his betrayal would travel. Every ally of the Trandoshans in the city of Treema had been told of the Defector, the species-traitor. Strangers all had been on the hunt for his head. 

They hadn’t made it out empty-handed, cursedly. What they’d gotten from Klatooine was this: a ship, a lead, and a grievous wound. 

(Firefights in a warehouse were the most wild of devotions to the Scorekeeper—until they toppled scaffolding heavy enough to break limbs)

(It took so much for a Wookiee limb to break. The wet crack of shattered tibia was a sound Nachkt would never rid himself of)

(The howl afterward was worse)

Formos took hours to flee to, hours of pain that should not have been borne, hours that the Wookiee slaves reportedly en-route to Ord Mantell and then the Kessel spice mines did not have. It was there, though, that Edep had chosen to hold up, and the only place Nachkt could think of that he’d be able to get medical attention for his mate. Rawrwargh had alternated stretches of blessed unconsciousness with the delirious howls of a rising fever by the time they’d arrived. 

The sounds of hurt, enraged Wookiee took Nachkt back, again and again, to the hours spent on duty in the slave quarters of the Defenestrator. 

“We’ll get you to Edep,” Nachkt promised him. He’d strapped Rawrwargh shakily into the copilot seat, the only place on the stolen craft that could reasonably accommodate his bulk and provide a prop for the hastily-set leg. Rawrwargh was out cold, humming uneasily under his breath as his eyes moved under his eyelids. 

Nachkt consciously brought his claws to card gingerly through Rawrwargh’s neck and shoulder-fur. It still amazed him, how tactile Rawrwargh was, and it wasn’t instinct yet to offer him a comforting touch when he was distressed. The motion eased the Wookiee almost immediately, though, and Nachkt cursed himself for not thinking of it sooner. 

“I know it feels…wrong, somehow, to be flying away from them. I know,” Nachkt hissed, so quietly he could barely hear himself. “But as soon as we can, we’ll go back. They’ll hold them at Ord Mantell for at least two or three weeks standard, to gather the best auction crowd, to train them and…and break them.” Nachkt hissed at himself, at the thought, at what he knew would happen to the Wookiees. But at least—at least they would still be alive. “We have that long to come up with a plan.”

Rawrwargh shot out a hand, placing it over Nachkt’s where it had tangled in the fur over his strongly-beating heart. So not unconscious, after all. With great effort, the Wookiee slitted open his eyes. They weren’t focusing right, but managed to land on Nachkt. 

[“Together,” Rawrwargh howled weakly. [“That’s how we’ll do it.”

Nachkt’s answering pull of lips, the approximation of a smile, was weak and watery. “You are the clever one of us.”

Nachkt knew he wasn’t a tactician. 

 

\----------------------------------------

Edep was. 

They’d managed to bundle Rawrwargh into a healer’s private house almost immediately upon touchdown—Edep refused to explain why he was able to grant the favor, and Nachkt was at least smart enough to know not to push it. However, when they’d been kicked out by the ponderously old humanoid to wait in her decrepit sitting room, Edep had immediately begun typing furiously into a personal flex-pad. 

Nachkt was on edge enough that the tac-tac sound of typing irritated him in moments, and enraged him in under ten minutes. “Sithspit, what in the Scorekeeper’s name are you doing?” he roared.

Instead of looking properly intimidated, the Bothan seemed annoyingly cheerful. He handed the flex-pad over to Nachkt. On it, Nachkt could see his own face, his vitals—age, height, weight. However, under those, the name Kecht Hasssor blinked. 

“I’d say it takes about two weeks to properly get settled in a new position, doesn’t it?” Edep grinned a touch too delightedly. “That gives you just enough time before the auction is slated, give or take a few days for wiggle room. Fancy you can come up with a way to break those poor bastards out before then?”

Nachkt couldn’t. He didn’t have the brain for it, the resourcefulness or skill. 

“I can do it,” he said anyway, because there wasn’t another option. They were running out of time. 

“You have to go pretty much now,” Edep warned him, tone still light but eyes steely. “No time to wait for anything—or anyone—if you want to get this done.”

He’d have to leave his mate behind. His mate, hurt and alone on a strange planet. The thought brought up nightmare scenarios of red tick marks on white paper—betrayal of his species was one thing, but this was Rawrwargh.

They’d never recover Rawrwargh’s family, his friends, if Nachkt didn’t do this. This was truly their last chance before the labyrinth of Kessel and violent oblivion. 

“You don’t tell him where I’ve gone until he’s fragging healed, or else he’ll tear off after me,” Nachkt hissed at Edep.

“Sure, sure, I love being ripped limb from limb,” Edep agreed easily. “’Cuz that’s what he’ll do to me to find out.” The Bothan didn’t actually seem unduly bothered by the threat.

“When he’s strong enough to actually do that is when you can tell him where I went,” Nachkt said.

Edep had just agreed, and the haze of red in the back of Nachkt’s mind grew stronger. He stood from his crouch over one uneven chair in the sitting room. 

The healer—he never got her name, never dared to ask—let him in to see Rawrwargh only grudgingly. 

She snapped out the diagnoses one by one, bad tempered. “He’s still feverish. It’s going down. He’s fine.” Still, the plaster cast bracing looked masterful, and even Nachkt could tell Rawrwargh was resting easier. 

It was getting more and more instinctual to want to hold Rawrwargh’s paw in his. The gesture was foreign, but every time Nachkt gave in, the thrill rushed through him. Trandoshans would link limbs, could even be known to twine around each other, but to hold just the bare edge of their palms together, claws and all, was still such a novelty. 

Nachkt took that comfort now, standing beside the bed his mate was in. 

Nachkt was never the clever one, and thus, saw no other action he could take. 

“Edep will help us,” Nachkt told Rawrwargh quietly, sensing his mate was awake, if not quite in control of all of his faculties yet. “He might have phased off our adventure in search for his own, but that does not mean he won’t offer us assistance from here.”

[“Trust a Bothan?” Rawrwargh joked weakly, repeating his words from the first time they’d met Edep, [“I’d just as soon trust a Lizard.”

The words, long since having lost their sting in the aftermath of what Rawrwargh and Nachkt were now, re-flared with a lost and angry truth in Nachkt’s limbs. 

“A mistake on both counts,” Nachkt murmured. He smoothed the flat of his palm over Rawrwargh’s brow, careful not to catch at his fur. 

Rawrwargh caught Nachkt’s hand in his again, deftly entwining their fingers and resting them on his chest, avoiding the claws with practice and ease. [“Stay.”

Nachkt’s breath hitched. How had Rawrwargh known--

[“Stay until I go under again.”

“I can do that,” Nachkt promised, and he did. He stayed by Rawrwargh’s bedside until the Wookiee’s breath evened out, and then some minutes after that, listening to the soft sound of his lungs, the steady brush of his fur against the sheets. 

He untangled their fingers and walked out. 

The flight to Ord Mantell would be long. 

_______________________________________________

 

Nachkt was jolted out of his embarrassingly depressed thoughts by the sound of movement on the other side of the crates he was crouched behind. He’d been waiting for this since he’d gotten off-duty this morning.

Despite the piss-hole that they were being held in, the Wookiee captives were well-guarded. Each had been relegated to little more than a durasteel cage with a grated floor. The cages were being held in a warehouse. For the most part, guard rotations mimicked the same on the Defenestrator: two guards inside to watch the cages; two guards patrolling outside to prevent anyone from getting too curious or light-fingered.

Tonight, however, the night before the auction, was different. Trade deals and their intricacies were far beyond Nachkt’s scope of understanding. He had been told, however, that it was a skeleton crew on watch tonight—one in, one out—as the bosses and their top brass were exchanging food and drink with their potential customers and wouldn’t care (or rather, notice) if their guards took lighter duty. Most of the other beings Nachkt had known and had a not-quite befriended had already left for whatever place served the cheapest rotgut, while they could still be assured of light duty.

Now, all that was left in the way was an abnormally large Rhodian with an even larger gun, and a grizzled Bothan patrolling outside the warehouse. This was the best chance that Nachkt would have.

At least now he could drop the subterfuge—kept up mostly by an extreme reticence to speak unless required. Now all that was left was his bread and butter: shooting, running, and getting some Wookiees far away from where they had originally been.

It was almost like a raid, he thought, the blood singing in him grimly. His body gloried darkly in what he knew how to do.

Nachkt evaded the Bothan’s patrol easily, slipping inside the warehouse by way of a loose panel. The Rhodian went down with a bolt right to the head, the sound covered by the helpful howls of the Wookiee prisoners. Not a one of them trusted Nachkt, but the ones that had learned to distinguish Trandoshan faces remembered him and what he’d done. They knew survival when they saw it.

No bother with the locks—they were shot off in a moment. Nachkt was careful to only free two Wookiees at a time—he needed to control how many left at a time. The path to the waiting cargo ship, several docking stations away, was not the least conspicuous route.

The tall brunette Wookiee was out in a trice, sniffing gently before darting out down the path Nachkt described. The other, smaller but broader, with a scarred nose and sunken eyes, turned to Nachkt. One heavy paw shot out and caught Nachkt around the throat, dragging him into the air without mercy. Nachkt felt his claws leave the ground as he fought down the instinct to panic. It was a losing battle.

[“Now we are out and know the way to your ship,” the Wookiee growled at him, eyes gimlet. [“Any fool can shoot off locks. Why should we keep a murdering Lizard alive?”

The Wookiee brought his face close to Nachkt’s, the filth of his breath and his captivity thick in Nachkt’s nostrils. Nachkt couldn’t answer because of the pressure on his windpipe—and that was the point, of course. The Wookiee held him until his brain was ringing, the rush of blood interrupted by an insistent sound like a wrist-comm chiming. It was only after Nachkt’s vision drifted into insistent grey-tones that he was dropped unceremoniously to the ground, the blaster wrenched from his lax grip. It pointed between his eyes as he retched for breath at the Wookiee’s feet.

[“Beg for your life,” the Wookiee demanded.

Nachkt did not hesitate. “Please. For my mate, I have to live.” 

He had to live so Rawrwargh could kick him into next ten-day for being so, so stupid as to go without him. Nachkt missed him so much. He could not die with that last touch in the healer’s bed all he had of him.

The Wookiee above him spat a thick wad of phlegm into the dirt. He turned away and shot the rest of the cages open.

That was all the détente that Nachkt knew he would receive, and the scrambled to his feet. Letting the Wookiees care for their own, he relieved the dead Rhodian of his weapon instead.

The echo of a comm chime startled him so badly that he almost pulled the trigger, all his muscles tensing reflexively. The escaping Wookiees did not hear it. Belatedly, Nachkt realized the comm was his, dead silent though it had been for long weeks.

The textual message was delayed delivery, the stamp of inception dated almost two days ago. It was from Edep.

::Mate Incoming::

Then,

::is not feeling particularly subtle. hope you didn’t want to be undercover much longer::

For a moment, Nachkt let the thrill of knowing his mate was close, was coming, wash over him. He’d catch hell, and he’d do so gladly, reuniting his partner with his family.

The broad Wookiee, the one who threatened him, barked sharply from closer than Nachkt had remembered him being.

[“Show us the way to the ship,” he ordered, gesturing at two others behind him. The others had clearly taken their chance already, but they had left behind a female Wookiee supporting a much older male with multiple wounds.

It was time to run. Nachkt nodded tightly and edged them out of the warehouse. He grew bolder when he saw the second guard, dead on the ground with his neck snapped.

“It’s two docking sections away,” Nachkt explained. “There are other Wookiees here, a few, so if you look confident and no one has noticed you’re gone, they won’t find you.” He gestured to the female and the injured male. “Everyone in this section should be piss drunk by now, so if you can look like you’re stumbling a bit, you’ll fit right in.”

The female nodded at him, eyes exhausted and barely seeing him. She and her charge took off at a quick hobble. The Wookiee with the blaster, however, hung back before spinning tightly into Nachkt’s space and baring his teeth again.

[“We are with you now, because we must be, and because we respect our brother Rawrwargh. But you, Lizard—know this. My name is Wrrshaddik, and when we are truly well and free, if I see you ever again, I will rip your head from your body.”

Nachkt didn’t know how to respond; he was too preoccupied to even step back—the fear of discovery, the thrill of his approaching mate, the heady dizziness of a goal almost completed all took precedence over the deserved ire of the being before him.

“Affirmative,” he blurted, then pushed past Wrrshaddik, heading towards his ship. He ducked between busy Longies and slipped through a break in two warehouse buildings that separated the port from where the ship was docked. Wrrshaddik followed, muttering dire things under his breath, but relaxed fractionally as the female Wookiee and her injured companion came into view.

\--then disappeared, accompanied by the sound of frenzied, desperate shrieking.

Roaring a war-cry of his own, Wrrshaddik reacted immediately, shoving Nachkt to the side and bolting for where his kin had disappeared. Nachkt hit the wall hard, rolled, and got up, dashing after him, a hot feeling in his glands, under his tongue.

Through the gap in the buildings, a YT-model cargo ship was hovering, and beings poured out of it. Robed and hooded figures in fatigues and face kerchiefs were stunning and cuffing the Wookiees that had fallen right into their grasp. Nachkt’s panicked mind counted six—one may have gotten away. It was not enough.

At the top of the extended gangplank, a corpulent pus-brown Hutt stood sneering down at the chaos. A blonde-brindled Wookiee snapped at him as he was dragged by. The Hutt’s smile widened.

“I do not even need to trek to the seller’s warehouse to collect my goods!” the Hutt laughed in delight. “They come running into my arms instead!”

Nachkt hissed and did not waste a moment more. He unstrapped his stolen blaster rifle and opened fire as much as he dared. As long as he didn’t hit the Wookiees, no one else would either, as they were clearly worth more alive. He tried to use that to his own advantage, dipping in and out of the knot of drawn Hutt guards, drawing fire while still making his adversaries afraid of missing. A haggard Twilek who made the mistake of getting too close got a rifle butt to the face for his trouble.

They were resisting, but the guards had subdued two more of the Wookiees; only three remained. Of these, it was only one young female, and older one, and Wrrshaddik, who spent as much of his time fighting as cursing the guards, the Hutt, the traitor Lizards, and the galaxy at large.

“Kriff!” Nachkt yelped as a bolt flashed far too close to his temple. He wasn’t sure he could hold them, there had to be something he could do to get at least these three out of here—

\--The speeder bike that crashed into the fray was a surprise. Amid the confusion, wayward fire, and the one humanoid that went down under the body of the speeder, the young female Wookiee took her chance and darted out of the fray. When someone tried to follow her, the bike’s rider rolled off and fired a bowcaster bolt directly into his body.

Bowcaster. Wookiee. Deep black with a white mask. Howling blood and vinegar to the world and ready to bend durasteel. He immediately engaged the nearest guards, beating them back with rage and vigor.

“Rawrwargh--!”

Nachkt had been staring too long. A Zygerrian was behind Nachkt one second, stunning him with a blow the next. When he stumbled, he was grabbed and dragged toward the ship’s gangplank, a blaster muzzle pressed firmly to his temple. Nachkt smelled ozone and plastic and blood and spite.

“Halt your fire,” the Hutt ordered pleasantly.

[“Your mother was a pus-sack who should have strangled you at birth!” Rawrwargh shot back—then turned and really looked.

Nachkt knew the moment that Rawrwargh registered the change in situation, because the Wookiee’s expression was unlike anything Nachkt had ever seen. Stark terror sparked heavy in his mate’s eyes as he saw Nachkt at blaster-point before him.

“Oh? That worked?” the Hutt laughed ponderously, blinking slowly. “Then allow me to press my advantage.” He nodded at the guards as they quickly finished subduing Wrrshaddik and the other female.

Rawrwargh’s hands, wrapped around the bowcaster handle, twitched with the need to fire. The Hutt shook his head just once.

“I think you drop that, and let us depart without further fuss. After all, if you don’t, you will put a blaster bolt into your scaly friend’s thick skull.”

Wrrshaddik roared as he was being dragged away. [“Rawrwargh!”

Rawrwargh swiveled his bowcaster to train on the beings restraining Wrrshaddik. In response, the sound of the blaster cocking swelled in the empty space between Nachkt’s skull and brain.

He closed his eyes, defeated but not wholly displeased. Two Wookiees had gotten away, and Rawrwargh could use the situation to save two more. Perhaps, one day, they’d even return all the others. It would be good to die in battle, however the final moment came. The Scorekeeper would be appeased.

Then Wrrshaddik let out an anguished wail, and Nachkt’s eyes snapped open just in time to see Rawrwargh’s bowcaster drop to the ground.

There was no resistance as Wrrshaddik was led away.

“Hmm. Trandoshan and Wookiee comrades. And I thought, in my line of work, I had seen it all,” the Hutt mused. He turned his back on Rawrwargh and slowly oozed into the ship as the engines powered up for full departure. The Zygerrian turned to do the same—but first, the blaster muzzle dropped and he shot Nachkt directly in the knee joint.

Nachkt missed the moment that the Hutt and five of the eight Wookiees took off. He was too busy tasting dirt and his own blood as the world swam before him. He didn’t miss the mournful ululation that followed, and the sound, his fault, all his damn fault, swamped even the pain in his throat and skin and tissue. He could not live in honor, and he could not die in it.

The stomp of heavy limbs, the dark Wookiee dropping to his knees at Nachkt’s side. Nachkt did not even have the strength to turn away as he was lifted gently into strong arms as if he weighed no more than a human. The jostling of the wound almost—almost—caused him to swoon, and he found his mouth full of fur as his face was pressed to a solid chest.

“You fool,” he bit out from between clenched teeth.

[“Save your breath. It will bring no one back.” Rawrwargh’s voice was cold and brittle, so different from the warm softness of his body against Nachkt’s.

“I’m sorry.”

It was not a good thing to say, but it was a true thing. It was the only thing Nachkt could think of. He was never the clever one.

He flinched when Rawrwargh halted, shifting the weight in his arms so that he could grab Nachkt’s chin in one huge paw. He looked into Nachkt’s eyes with such an intensity that Nachkt could not help but focus on him—not his own guilt or the dizzying waves of pain, but instead the hot depths of Rawrwargh’s gaze.

[“I would make this choice, again and again, no matter what you said or what was at stake,” Rwarwargh told him, never once blinking his eyes never shifting away. [“So do not berate what I might have done or who I might have sacrificed, because it would not change what I choose.”

Nachkt’s eyes could not focus anymore, nor his neck hold him up at that angle. He let his eyes drift shut, his head fall back.

[“You let me think I lost you twice in these last days,” Rawrwargh said, quieter.

Nachkt was being drawn off into unconsciousness. It was a blessed relief and it was warm, blood hot, like the arms he was being held in. He drifted off with claws tangled into the fur over Rawrwargh’s heart.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm angry and vindictive and tired of stories never delivering what they promised. So I tried very hard to make Ace cry.


End file.
